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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Thailand’s Government Claims It Can Monitor The Country’s 30M Line Users

Government officials in Thailand last year demanded access to chat app Line so that they could monitor conversations taking place in the country, and this week a politician claimed that they can now do so.

The Nation reports that ICT Minister Pornchai Rujiprapa told a press conference that the government “can monitor all the nearly 40 million Line messages sent by people in Thailand each day.”

A Line spokesperson denied the validity of the original report and told TechCrunch that it does not provide user information to Thailand’s government.

The minister’s claim is quite the revelation in Thailand, which is one of handful of markets in Asia where mobile messaging apps are bigger than Facebook. Line claims more than 30 million registered users in Thailand, and that could mean that it has more signups than Facebook.

Minister Pornchai revealed that any users who come across messages that violate Thailand’s strict lèse-majesté laws (which protect against defamation of the monarchy) should contact authorities who can “trace where the messages originally come from.”

Past arrests under lese majeste have related the sending of SMS, Facebook messages, internet forums and websites, and perhaps Line will soon be a part of that. But there is also a new undercurrent of political activism that Thai authorities may be keen to combat.

The suggestion that authorities now have free filter over all messages sent via the country’s top social network is a hugely worrying development from a privacy perspective, not to mention Line’s own security.

It remains possible that the government could be keeping tabs on the service using its own system, and thus without the cooperation of Line. Officials were thought be planning their own internet gateway for a more efficient censorship system and that could tie into this.

No details have been announced publicly on the project and even if it is genuine it would take years to construct, but it highlights the possibility that Thailand might work with ISPs, operators and service providers but not internet companies themselves to monitor and govern its patch of cyberspace.